Episode 110. Part 2
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What the Fuck?!
Rina: What? I don’t think so.
Mike: Not to my knowledge.
Valerie: Look at this.
She points to a structure on the screen.
Valerie: That’s not normal.
Arden: Does it match the DNA mapping?
Valerie: Everyone’s DNA is different, but this is unusual.
Arden: It’s obviously constructed.
Valerie: It appears to have been engineered, possibly with some chemical virus. There are viruses that will rewrite DNA.
Arden: Can it rewrite an entire body?
Valerie: I’m not sure what effect this would have, but once it’s in the blood system, it could—
Rina: Is it reversible?
Valerie: I don’t know how to—I’d need access to the virus or the agent that did this initially, but I don’t see any signs of any usual virus material in here.
Arden: Is there any other vector that could cause it other than a virus?
Valerie: Well, you could have a proto-virus like a nano-bot or something like that in some sort of chemical, but … Mr. Carter, do you know what was produced in this factory where you were exposed?
Arden: It was a Blue Sun factory and that’s pretty much all I know about it.
Mike: That doesn’t narrow it down.
Arden: (agreeing) No. (to Rina) Did you hear more in the news stories about it, what was produced in that factory?
Rina: No. (shakes her head) Quite frankly, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to surf. Have you?
Arden: No, that’s why I’m asking.
Valerie runs the bloodwork through a medical search engine to compare the structures she’s found, and the first pass produces hundreds of thousands of misses and 168 hits. She opens the hits…and the response comes back: classified.
Valerie: Now, that is interesting.
Standing off to the side, Rina leans toward Arden, whispering:
Rina: Define ‘interesting’.
Arden: The ‘Chinese curse’ kind of interesting.
Rina: I was afraid you’d say that.
Valerie turns from the screens.
Valerie: So. It’s not that unheard of, apparently, just not something to find out. You’re not keeping anything from me that might be relevant to this, are you? Talk it over. I’ll be back.
Before we can answer or even prevaricate, she walks out of her office. As soon as she’s gone, Rina checks Valerie’s computer to see if she’s left it on.
Mike: Don’t mess with the computer. What do you think you could do with it?
Rina: Make copies, hack something. I don’t know. Order pizza or something. I hate just standing around doing nothing.
Arden: (Handing her his PDA) Here, I’ve got games loaded in it.
Rina: You got Scrabble on this thing? Tetris?
She doesn’t play with it but slaps it in her palm, nervously eyeing the door. Arden clears his throat and she hands it back unplayed.
Arden: It’s my instinct to tell her everything that happened. That, however, is opening us up to some serious trouble if she is… unfriendly.
Rina: For all we know, this place could be bugged.
Arden: Then we’re screwed anyway, then.
Rina: We haven’t said anything yet.
Arden: No, but they have the bloodwork and when she data-based it, it came up classified. Despite that, I think we should say that some…elements…tried to use drugs to force Mike to tell them stuff they wanted to know. As to what that stuff was, you don’t want to know either. However, it is Mike’s decision.
Mike: We can tell her what the drug is, see if that doesn’t—
Arden: Do we know what the drug is? You think it’s Chempliance? (A beat) Well, I suppose we could. That’s a good start. If she wants to know more, she’ll ask.
Valerie’s timing is excellent. We’d no sooner decided on this course of action when she comes back through her door. Rina wonders if her office really is bugged. Then again, maybe the woman was watching them through the plastic walls.
Valerie: (to Mike) Any details jogged from that memory of yours?
Arden: We believe that the chemical that Mike was exposed to goes by the trade name of Chempliance.
Valerie immediately does a search on the name. The results come back and she frowns.
Valerie: Which is, of course, classified.
Arden: I have seen the effect of Chempliance on people though. It is not fun. Basically, it takes away free will.
Valerie: Well…we can try to reverse engineer it. We have a chemical engineer attached to the lab. We might be able to convince him this is worth looking into. You said there were some privacy issues?
Arden: The privacy issues is obviously with Chempliance in his system, the Alliance probably wants him to….disappear.
Valerie: Okay, well. Do you want me to bring in this engineer?
Arden: If he’s trustworthy.
Valerie: We can try to reverse engineer the drug. Will that do it? Mr. Carter, are you open to that?
Mike: What are my other options?
Valerie: I could try to find you a drug cocktail that would grant you a greater willpower, but this is not a well-investigated area. And with your unusual chemistry, we’re not sure if it would be safe to even try to give you the normal brain drugs.
Arden: It would be very hard to deliver drugs to the brain directly. Because of the blood/brain barrier. Probably have to inject into the spinal cord.
Valerie: Probably. Or we can put in a shunt.
Arden: I think it’s worth a shot.
Rina: So do I. I think that he’s been drugged up enough, but wait a minute: Mike hasn’t answered yet.
Mike: I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to stick around Osiris for too long. So I’ll go for whatever’s faster.
Rina: The man’s spoken.
Valerie: I’ll go get the doctor.
When she’s out of the room and we’re alone again, Arden pulls out his comm and calls the Edge residence to check on everyone there. Everything’s fine. Arden keeps the call short, not knowing how soon Valerie will return.
She comes back with a doctor in tow. The man looks like a mortician. Pale. Solemn. Balding. Creepy. Valerie makes the introductions.
Valerie: This is Dr. Roger Duncan. He’s a neurochemical engineer.
Duncan: So… Dr. Sampson tells me that you may have some unusual chemicals you need reproduced. Do you have any idea how the genetic engineering was done or know the chemical that was used?
Valerie: We think he was exposed to a chemical called Chempliance.
Duncan: (lights up) Oh, yes. I am familiar with Chempliance. It’s used in crowd control, in certain areas. Usually the effects are quite temporary.
This guy is familiar with Chempliance? When all the search results come back classified? Really? What are the odds of that happening, and just when we need someone like him the most? Either we’re the luckiest damned crew in the Universe, or there’s something seriously hinky going on here.
Arden opens up the notes on Chempliance that he’d been able to scav off the Cortex before the information was shut down, copies it to a data chip and pulls it out of his PDA.
Arden: Here is everything I’ve been able to research on it so far.
Duncan: (taking the chip) I would be interested in taking a look at your patient, do some scans and extract some fluids. It’s all quite painless actually, there are virtually no pain nerves in the brain…
And he goes on like this for a bit more, getting creepier as he gets excited by the exercise. This guy might be a brilliant neurochemical engineer and a doctor, but his bedside manner is downright bloodcurdling.
Arden: Can we do it this afternoon?
And Arden isn’t much better.
Duncan: It might be possible. Yes.
Rina’s trying very hard not to twitch, but she wants nothing more than to get the hell out of this house of horrors and away from Duncan, who’s one seriously freakin’ creepy dude. Even Mike looking nervous at this point—and for someone who’s normally unflappable, that’s saying something.
Mike: This afternoon is not that great, because we have that thing….perhaps in the morning.
Arden: It could be arranged.
Duncan: Very well. Morning would work fine. (to Mike) Where are you staying?
Rina gets one hard blare from her internal alarms. Don’t answer that!
Mike: At a friend’s house.
Duncan: Very good. I’m sure Dr. Sampson has contact information from you.
Arden: She does.
Duncan: Very good then. I’ll see you, shall we say, seven o’clock in the morning?
Arden: Seven should be fine.
Duncan: See you at seven. (holding up the chip) Thank you for this information.
Duncan leaves. Valerie seems a bit surprised at her colleague’s behavior. One gets the impression that the man normally doesn’t say much, or show such enthusiasm.
Arden: We should probably go. We have that thing to do.
Rina: Yes, we do. That thing we do but once a year.
Arden: (agreeing) Now.
We thank Valerie for helping us and tender our quick goodbyes and beat a fast exit out of there. Once outside in the sunshine, we debate our next move. We are clearly not going back to Christian’s, for the Feds to follow us there. Neither are we coming back to OCURC at seven a.m.
Rina: We come back tomorrow, we’ll walk right into an ambush. You know it.
Arden: I don’t think we should come back. I’ve got a very bad feeling.
Mike: Yeah… That guy’s got ‘operator’ written all over him or something.
Arden: Along with issues with his mother and dead bodies.
Mike: No, no. He clearly knows what—
Rina: He knew right away what we were talking about. He’s in the loop.
Mike: And that’s bad.
Arden: I’m getting a cab.
Rina: Be sure you take the third cab. Never take the first one.
Arden: That’s what they would expect us to do, so we’ll take the second one.
Rina: Good enough.
Mike: …Ohh-kay…
Rina: (pointing to Arden) Someone who reads the classics. I’m surprised you don’t know that one: Sherlock Holmes.
Arden get us that cab and has us driven to a local hotel. It’s not an expensive hotel, but neither is it a fleabag. Just small enough to be affordable and ubiquitous enough to be anonymous in. It’s got few amenities beyond a place to sleep and wash up in every room, with no Cortex access but a vid screen we can order food and shows on. We avoid the hotel comms. Instead we go to a nearby busy restaurant and use the comms there to call the Edge residence, to tell Nika to meet us at the restaurant at seven in the evening.
Christian answers. He’s on his way out to see the Guild about the Camden family, thinking if he could get this matter cleared up, our lives would be much easier. So, regrettably, he will be unable to join us. But Nika’s free. Christian passes her the phone and we arrange for her to meet us at the restaurant near our hotel. We give her the time for the meet and end the call.
That done, we arrange to go to the restaurant early, so that when she comes within range of it and our comms, we can call her before she enters it to tell her to meet us somewhere else. Yes, we are that paranoid and no, we’re not taking any chances.
Our intricate planning done, all that’s left now is to wait. Wait til seven p.m. and our meet with Nika.
Café Karnak
Memphis, Osiris
18:30 hrs, local time.
We get a table at a window and Rina keeps an eye on the street in one direction while Mike covers the other. When we spot Nika, we nod to Arden and he calls her on his PDA.
Arden: We’re just a little nervous right now. Why don’t you come to our hotel?
Nika: What did you people do?
Arden gives her the directions and we leave. Moments later we’re back in our room at the Hotel Pi and we fill Nika in.
Nika: (drawling) It would be nice if it occasionally went simple for us.
Rina: Where’s the fun in that? You’d be bored out of your skull.
Arden: Did you ever play tic-tac-toe? That’s as simple as we’re ever going to get. Ever.
Rina: Yeah, but don’t the majority of those games end up skunked?
Arden: Exactly.
So what are we going to do? There’s no going back to the hospital. That’s a given. Arden is willing to bet that Valerie will call him or contact him in some way because she seemed put off by Duncan’s interest as well. In any case, Arden’s all for getting some cargo for the Gift and leaving. But that wouldn’t help Mike with what he’s got.
Rina: What do you want to do, Mike?
Mike: She wanted me, to do what, exactly?
Arden: She wanted to reverse engineer the chemical that affected you.
Rina: The one that seemed to have genetically engineered you to be something other than what you were.
Mike: Okay. So, she needs to figure out if there’s a way to do a cure.
Nika: She may not.
Arden: Yeah. Duncan might—
Mike: No, I’m just assuming that he’s just going to put me in plastic.
Nika: No, you may already have the information we need. If he already knows what Chempliance is.
Rina: Can we track him down to where he lives and beat the information out of him?
Mike: I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Nika: (sotto voce) No.
Mike: Not on Osiris. If we were out on the Rim somewhere, sure. But on Osiris? Too many people lying out here. He is too high-profile a target, but…
He stops, eyes narrowing.
Nika: Oh, I love it when you think.
Rina: Now you know why I love him.
Nika: What are you thinking?
Mike: I was thinking if we could get hold of some Chempliance another way, maybe she could do without his help.
Arden: How would we get hold of some Chemliance?
Rina: We could start a riot and hope they use it on us.
Nika: Yeah, no.
Arden: No. Not just no, but hell no.
Rina: Okay, look. Just wait. It’s used for crowd control.
Mike: That’s right, yeah.
Rina: It’s made for crowd control. So why don’t we—
Nika: But the parameters they use on you may not be in fact what they’re using…(gestures to Mike).
Mike: That’s true. That would be a risk.
Nika: My guess would be that what you were subjected to was an experimental derivative, or a higher—
Arden: A higher strength—
Nika: Or yes, a higher strength.
Rina: At least we’ll be higher up the ladder toward the answer, right?
Nika: Not really, because ff you bring in the normal Chempliance and what they’re using was a derivative or an extract that has been enhanced or altered so as to give us this, what we have from plain Chempliance won’t translate. If we hand her the Chempliance, that may not translate to what we need for him.
Rina: It’s been two months. I suppose it’s too much to ask that anything we’ve pulled off of Mike immediately is still on the ship.
Arden: I’m sure there’s a blood sample.
Nika: At the very least, they can test that to see if it’s a lessened—
Arden: ‘they’, who?
He’s got a point. The people who might help Mike are also the prime suspects gunning for him.
Rina: Okay, should we go back to the sample of Chempliance-by-any-means-possible?
Arden: I have no idea where we could find some.
Rina: The police. Civilian security companies. Anybody who would need to be—
Arden: Do you think you can buy a police supply officer who’s on the take?
Mike: If we had a riot, that would do it.
A riot on Osiris, would have some serious repercussions. Especially given what we’d have to do to start one in the first place.
Rina: Wait. We don’t have to start a riot.
Arden: There’s protestors at the Blue Sun Headquarters for the past three days.
Rina: That’s right.
Nika: Have the cops been hosing them down?
Rina: Not yet.
Arden: But that doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow.
Rina: At least the vans will be there with the stuff ready to be use in case it gets out of hand. Sneak into the back of the van, grab a packet and get the heck out of there.
Nika: I’m not saying it’s a bad plan…
Rina: It’s a plan.
Mike: It’s something. It might be a start.
Nika: Which is a damn sight better than what we had ten minutes ago. If we’re already having protests, shoving them into high gear and causing an actual riot would not necessarily be hard.
We review what we know of Chempliance and it’s method of delivery: Individual shotgun rounds, a liquid-gas scatter burst, and a gas shell like tear gas. Theoretically we could mug a policeman of his gun and we’d have it.
Mike: Yes. Although it’ll probably be the riot police, since they’re not going to give this to just anyone.
Rina: If you had sticky fingers, you could just lift a shell right off the back of his belt without him noticing.
Arden: Ummm….I don’t have sticky fingers.
Rina: Neither do I, it was just an idea. Who do we know with sticky fingers?
Nobody. We’re back to stealing it out of the van. Nighttime. After the protest, if the vans are still there. We would need to put ourselves in place beforehand, meaning we would need to do some reconnaissance.
We turn on the vid screen and catch the news feeds of the protest in progress.
Sure enough, there are protestors milling about with their signs and their shouted slogans. We spy at least one tactical van off to the side. Plus numerous riot police in full gear. The ticker tape at the bottom of the vid screen gives us the details: protests over alleged Blue Sun responsibility in the Miranda scandal, due to its development of the Pax. Blue Sun was a major promoter of the utopia of Miranda. It was a corporate-designed world, with corporate housing and corporate jobs…etc. Miranda is now a murdered world, all souls lost… if not all souls dead.
Rina: Boy, were they outa pocket for that one.
The general media reception of the protest is one of outrage: how dare these ruffians use this tragedy for their political agenda? And more stories and commentary in this vein blather on.
So, if we’re to put our plan into motion, we must first have a target.
Arden: Will a Blue Sun security riot guy have the Chempliance on him?
Rina: I’ll betcha he’s got the keys to the van on him.
Mike: I would expect the Blue Sun security people will be better off than the Osiris police in general.
Arden: You think so?
Mike: Yes.
Nika: Considering they have their own riot squad? I would expect them to be extremely well armed.
Mike: And considering they’d want to use non-lethal weapons because they are not the police…
Nika: Because if they shot somebody, they’d have to explain it.
Rina: You know, I’m willing to take the chance that you’ll be able to bail me out and go right up to one of them and hit them. Start a fight.
Mike: A riot here is a little more sophisticated then your mesh vest.
Rina: Which is…(oh, crap) … At Christian’s.
Mike: You can always go back to the ship and get your gear, and suit up for it.
Rina: Do we want to lead them back to the ship?
No. We could pick a time and just pick-pocket what we need off one of the security guards.
Rina: Look, there’s a riot going on right now, isn’t there? A protest? Why don’t we go and do a little surveillance. See how they do the perimeter. Pick out the weakest link.
Go back tomorrow and take it out.
Arden: I was under the impression that we wanted to have this stuff by tomorrow. That’s not the case?
Rina: Then we’ll do steps A and B all together. Tonight.
Mike: So, what are we doing?
Nika: The cover of darkness would be the best time to get a hold of that stuff, certainly.
Arden: If they’re patrolling under the cover of darkness. We’ll wander down to the area and see what’s where. How?
Rina: Go to the protest area. Hang out on the perimeter. See how they patrol the perimeter. Check out the weakest link. Choose our target.
Mike: It all depends on how much trouble you want to put into it. If you want to go back to the ship, you’ll have to allow for travel time to and from, that’s a half-our or more, plus another thirty to get to Blue Sun and—
Nika: Why are we going to the ship, again?
Mike: If you want weapons, for example.
Nika: No.
Mike: So no tools. No armor.
Rina: I got my fists, I got my tools, I got duct tape—
Nika: No. The last thing we want is the kind of attention that would be drawn if you got caught brushing up against a security guard and you tried to filch his Chempliance and if you’re wearin’ mesh or if you’re wearin’ weapons, it’s gonna get that much uglier. If you’re just somebody who said, Oh look, I really want to see what this does…
Mike: I really don’t want to go into this without some kind of back-up plan if things get hairy but…
Nika: If things get hairy, scatter to the four winds.
Arden: I was just thinking that.
Rina: Okay. We scatter to the far winds. Do we have a rendezvous point?
Mike: Remember, Blue Sun Headquarters isn’t on the main drag but out there a ways. If they shut down the mag lev that goes out there, for example, we’re kinda stuck there.
Nika: We’re trying to keep this as low key as possible right?
So we debate the pickpocket idea again, this time with Nika going in to do the deed. What if they catch her in the act? She shrugs and declares she’ll cry rape. After all, they’re already surrounded by angry people—what do you think will happen if they find out the cops won’t let a girl go? That there would be sufficient to start a riot, Yessir. It won’t be the low key in-and-out Nika started out with, but it would get the job done: we could snatch the Chempliance under cover of the ensuing chaos.
Arden suggests a doctor-patient ruse. Have one of the crew simulate doing down in a fit and another of the crew filches the Chempliance off the guard as Arden runs up as a Good Samaritan doc. Then we’ll just wisk ourselves off, like a doctor taking his patient to the hospital, before anyone notices what we’ve done.
Mike doesn’t seem entirely convinced with either plan, but he’s willing to try either one of them.
Mike: Yeah. (A Beat) Let’s go take a look.
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